CHAPTER XVIII
ERNIE GOES EAST

The Army did for Ernie neither what Mr. Trupp hoped nor what Mr. Pigott feared.

Ernie was in truth very much the modern man, and had absorbed unconsciously the spirit of industrial democracy. He was open-minded, intelligent and sincere. The false idealism that is at the back of all Militarism, the bully-cum-bluff principle that has been the creed of the barrack-square at all times all over the world, from Sparta to Potsdam, made no appeal to him. In the British Army, it is true, there was even at that date little of the spirit of orthodox Militarism, but the shadow of the Continental System and the heritage of a false tradition still hung over it.

He found himself plucked out of the world of to-day with its quick flow of ideas, its give and take, its elasticity, its vivid unconscious spirituality, and plunged back into the darkness of medievalism: forced labour, forced worship, forced obsequiousness, a feudal lord against whom there was no appeal, with corrupt retainers who squeezed the serf without mercy.

When his first drill-instructor in a moment of patronizing confidence informed the squad of which Ernie was a member that "It's swank as makes the soldier," others were amused; but Ernie, who giggled dutifully with the rest, thought how silly and how disgusting.

Ernie always remembered that drill-sergeant's illuminating remark, and placed it alongside that of a veteran Colonel, dating from Crimean days, who said in Ernie's hearing with the offensive truculence that a certain type of officer still thinks he owes it to himself and to his position to cultivate,

"That man's no good to me." He was speaking of a Company Sergeant-Major who had the manners of a gentleman. "Take him away and shoot him. I want a man who'll chuck his chest, and beat his leg, and own the barrack square."

Ernie saw very soon that the Army system was based on the old two-class conception with an insuperable barrier between the two classes, and the underclass deprived of the right to appeal, the right to combine, the right to strike. And he saw equally clearly, and with far more surprise, that in spite of its obvious limitations, and openness to brutality and abuse, the system worked astonishingly well, given good officers—and his own were unusually good upon the whole.

Ernie did not know that the barrack was in fact the heir of the old monastic habit and tradition with its herding together of males, its little caste of priests who alone possessed the direct access to God denied to common men, its sacrosanct dogmas, its insuperable prejudices, its life of unquestioning obedience to authority with the consequent thwarting of intellectual and spiritual development that is the outcome of free communion between man and man; and on the other hand its genuine religious fervour, its abnegation, its devotion to duty, and disinterested service of the Commonwealth.

Ern, it is true, who realized some of these things and was dimly conscious of others, was different from most of his mates and superior to them: rather more intelligent and much more refined. The bulk of them were the conscripts of Necessity; some, like himself, had made mistakes; a few, nearly always themselves the sons of old soldiers, were genuine volunteers.

And yet Ern was by no means unhappy. If he was something of a critic, he was not in the least a rebel. At first the pressure of discipline served to brace the boy, as Mr. Trupp had anticipated. Moreover, if he vaguely apprehended what was vicious in the military system, there was much he could not fail to enjoy, because he was young, virile and healthy; and not a little he could honestly admire. He loved the drill: the rhythmical marching en masse, the movements of great bodies of men swinging this way and that like one, actuated by a single purpose, directed by a single mind, worshipping a single God enthroned at the saluting-point, satisfied his religious spirit, exalted and transfigured him as did nothing he was to know in later days. The outdoor existence, the hard athleticism, the good fellowship, and above all the communal life, appealed to all that was best in him. Indeed in this organization, abused by advanced thinkers in Press and Parliament alike, he was to find a fullness of corporate life, an absorption of the individual in the mass, a bee-like enthusiasm for the hive, such as he was never to discover outside the Army in after years.

Moreover there was a goal held before his eyes, as it is held before the eyes of all young English soldiers.

That goal was India.

The Shiny was the Private Soldier's Paradise, the old hands would tell the young in the canteens at night.

"Things are different there, my boy. In the Shiny a swoddy's a gentleman. Punkah-wallahs to pull the cords in the hot weather, a tiger curled at your feet to keep the snakes at bay, bearer to clean your boots, shooting parties, bubbly by the barrel, I don't know what all."

Because of this jewel that was for ever dangled before his eyes, Ernie bore a good deal without complaining.

A youth who had enlisted with him, and for much the same reason, induced his people to buy him out after six months.

Ernie made no such attempt.

"I'm going through with it now," he said. "Want to see a bit before I'm done and take em home a tale or two."

After a spell of service in Ireland, at the close of the South African War, when Ernie was turned twenty, the expected call came.

A draft was going out to join the First Battalion of the Hammer-men at Jubbulpore, and Ernie went with it.

The cheering transport dropped down the Thames one misty November afternoon, passing hay-laden barges, timber ships from the Baltic, and rusty tramps from all over the world.

The smell of the sea, so familiar and so good, thrilled Ernie's susceptible heart. It spoke to him of home, of the unforgotten things of childhood, of his passing youth, of much that was intimate and dear. He spent most of that first evening on deck, long after dark, in spite of the drizzle, watching the coast lights.

Once they passed quite close to a light-ship, swinging desolately on the tide.

"What's that?" he asked a sailor.

"Sovereign Light," the man told him.

Ernie leapt to the name familiar to him from childhood.

How often had he not climbed the hill behind his home of winter evenings, and waited in the chalk-pit above the larch spinney for that far-off spark to leap out of the darkness and warm his expectant heart.

He swung about and stared keenly through the gloom at a light winking at them from the land.

"Then that's the light-house under Beau-nez!" he said, pointing.

"That's it," the man answered. "And Beachbourne underneath. All them lights strung out like a necklace along the coast,—Bexhill, Hastings, Beachbourne. It's growing into a great place. D'you know it?"

Ernie's heart and eyes were full.

"My home's there," he said. "And my old dad."

He stayed on deck peering through the darkness, till the last light had disappeared and they had swung round Beau-nez into the Channel and he could see the Seven Sisters, the gap that marks the mouth of the Ruther, and the cliffs between Newhaven and Rotting-dean. Then he went below and turned in.

Thereafter, his home behind him, he began to taste the new life, the life of adventure.

He felt the surge of the Atlantic, saw whales spouting in the Bay, marked off the coast of Portugal a lateen sail which first whispered of the East; gazed up at the Rock of Gibraltar, noted there caparisoned Barbs, their head-stalls studded with turquoises to keep the Evil One away, welcomed the Mediterranean sun, and gazed at the snow-capped hills of Crete.

In Port Said he landed and saw his first mosque. He examined it with interest.

Very bleak-like, he wrote home to Mr. Pigott. More like a chapel than a church. And more like the Quaker Meeting-house in the Moot than either. No stained glass or crucifixes or nothing. I was more at home there than the Catholics.

In the Canal he marked the black hair-tents of the travelling Bedouins, and saw a British Camel Corps trekking slowly across the desert against the hills beyond. He sweated in the Red Sea and gazed with awe at the sultry rocks of Aden, and followed with delight the flying-fish skimming across the Indian Ocean.

Then one dawn the engines stopped; the ship lay at rest; and in his nostrils, blown from the land, there was the smell of incense.

"Makes you think of the Queen of Sheba," said Ernie. "Spices and Tyre and Sidon and all the rest," and he closed his eyes and saw Mr. Pigott standing with the pointer before the black-board, addressing his class.

"Not alf," said his unimaginative friend. "Give me the Pevensey Road o Sadaday nights. Fried fish and chips."

They went on deck to find themselves lying in the lovely island-sprinkled harbour of Bombay; boats with curved bamboo yards and brown-skinned crews of pirates under the ship's side; and Parsee money-lenders in shining hats on deck offering to change the money of those who had any.

Ernie looked across to the land, lifting blue in the wondrous dawn—the land that was to be his home for the next six years.

CHAPTER XIX
THE REGIMENT

Ernie joined his Battalion in the Central Provinces. The Forest Rangers, as famous in the South Country as the Black Watch in the Highlands, and of far longer pedigree, was first raised from the iron-ore workers by the Hammer Ponds on the Forest Ridge in the heart of the then Black Country of England to meet the imminent onslaught of the Spanish Armada. In those days the Hammer-men, as they were called familiarly from the start, watched the coast from the mouth of the Adur to Rye and Winchelsea; and in the succeeding centuries they left their bloody mark upon the pages of history, the memories of their fellow-countrymen, and the bodies of the King's enemies.

The most ancient of English regiments, it carries on its colours more honours than any but the 60th. For more than three tumultuous centuries it has been distinguished even in that British Infantry which has never yet encountered in war its match or its master. The splendid foot-soldiers of Spain broke in Flanders before its thundering hammer-strokes; in Flanders and elsewhere in later times the legions of Imperial France surged in vain against its bayonets; and in our own day the Prussian Guard, as insolent and vain-glorious as the veterans of Napoleon, has recoiled before the invincible stubbornness of the peasants of Sussex.

The officers were drawn almost exclusively from two or three of the oldest public-schools. Ernie found they were keen soldiers, and efficient, immensely proud of their regiment, athletic, and better-mannered than most. But as a whole they were singularly stupid men, deliberately blind to the wonders of the country in which they lived, proud of their blindness, and cultivating their insularity. There was one shining exception.

When the new draft paraded for inspection, a scarecrow Major wearing the South African ribands walked slowly up and down the ranks with a word for each man. He was very tall, and so lean as to be almost spectral. His voice was charming and leisured, reminding Ernie of his father. He was friendly too, almost genial. It was obvious that he based his authority on his own spiritual qualities and not on the accident of his position. There was no rattling of the sabre, no fire-eating, no attempt to put the fear of God into the hearts of the recruits.

When he came to Ernie, he asked,

"What name?"

"Caspar, Sir."

The Major looked at the lad from beneath his sun-helmet with sudden curiosity.

"Are you ..." he began, and pulled himself up short. "I hope you'll be happy as a Hammer-man," he said, and passed on.

Later he addressed the draft in a gentle little speech of the kind that annoyed his brother-officers almost past bearing.

"You have all heard of Death and Glory," he began. "Well, in this country there's a certain amount of Death going about, if you care to look out for it, but very little Glory. You have also heard no doubt from your mothers and the missionaries that the black man is your brother. It may be so. But in this country there are no black men and therefore no brothers. There are brown men who are your remote cousins; and they aren't bad fellows if you keep them in their place, and remember your own. On Sundays there is church for those who like it; and the same for those who don't. For the rest, whether you are happy or the reverse depends in the main upon your health, and your health depends in the main on yourselves. Be careful what you drink, and don't suck every stick of sugar-cane a native offers you. Remember you are Hammer-men and not monkeys. Most of you are men of Sussex, as are most of your officers; and we all know that the Sussex man wunt be druv. But discipline is discipline and must be maintained. We don't hammer each other more than we can help, nor do we hammer the natives more than is good for them. We exist to hammer the King's enemies. And now I wish you all well and hope you'll find the Regiment a real home."

Major Lewknor's long spidery legs carried him back to the bungalow where his wife awaited him.

She was a little woman, clearly Semitic, fine as she was strong, with eyes like jewels and the nose of an Arab.

"My dear," said the Major, "in your young days did you ever hear of one Hans Caspar?"

"My Jock, did I ever hear of one Napoleon Buonaparte?" mocked his mate. "What about him?"

"I was at Trinity with his son," replied the Colonel.

"We used to call him Hathri. A charming fellow, and a brilliant scholar, but——"

"What about him?" said Mrs. Lewknor, who seemed suddenly on the defensive.

"His son has just joined us," answered the Major. "In the ranks."

The lady handled the sugar-tongs thoughtfully. Her memory travelled back more than twenty years to a great ball in Grosvenor Square, and the timid son of the house, a gawky, awkward fellow with a reputation for shyness and brilliance. He could not dance, but under the palms in the conservatory, tÊte-À-tÊte, he could talk—as Rachel Solomons had never heard a man talk yet—of things she had never heard talked about: of a place called Toynbee Hall somewhere in the East End; of a little parson named Samuel Barnett; of the group of young University men—Alfred Milner, Arnold Toynbee, Lewis Nettleship—he and his wife were gathering about them there with the aim of bridging the gulf between Disraeli's Two Nations; of the hopes of a redeemed England and a new world that were rising in the hearts of many. That young man saw visions and had made her see them too. She had cut two dances to listen to that talk, and when at last an outraged partner had torn her away and Edward had said in his sensitive stuttering way, his face shining mysteriously,

"Shall we ever meet again?"

She had answered with astonishing emphasis,

"We must."

But they never did. Fate swung his scythe; her father died and she had to abandon her London season. Edward Caspar went abroad to study at Leipzig. And next winter she met her Hammer-man and launched her boat on the great waters.

But she had never forgotten that mysterious half-hour in which the trembling young man had knocked at her door, entered her sanctuary; and she, Rachel the reserved, had permitted him to stay.

At that moment Reality had entered her life—unforgettable and unforgotten.

India from the first tantalized Ernie. It was for him a mysterious and beautiful book, its pages for ever open inviting him to read, yet keeping its secret inviolate from him; for he could not read himself and there was no one to read to him. His officers, capable at their work, and good fellows enough in the main, Ernie soon discovered to be illiterate to an almost laughable degree. They not only knew nothing outside the limited military field, but they took a marked professional pride in their ignorance.

Ernie, used to his father's large philosophical outlook on any subject, his scholarly talk, his learning, was amazed at the intellectual apathy and crustacean self-complacency, sometimes ludicrous, more often naÏf, occasionally offensive, of those set in authority over him.

Major Lewknor was the solitary exception. He was the one University man in the Regiment, and, whether as the result of a more catholic education or a more original temperament, he always stood slightly apart from his brother-officers. When he was a young man they had mocked at him quietly; now that he was a field officer they stood somewhat in awe of his ironical spirit. Some of his more dubious sayings were handed on religiously from last-joined subaltern to last-joined subaltern. The worst of them—his famous—Patriotism is the last refuge of every scoundrel—was happily attributed by the Army at large to a chap called Johnston who, thank God! was not a Hammer-man at all, but a Gunner or a Sapper or something like that. A Sapper probably. It was just the sort of thing you would expect a Sapper to say: for Sappers wore flannel shirts and never washed.

But if the Major was undoubtedly critical of what was obsolete and theatrical in the Service that he loved, few possessed a deeper reverence or more intimate understanding of the much that was noble in it.

"After the really grand ritual of a big ceremonial parade," he would say, "when you actually do transcend yourself and become one with the Larger Life, for grown men in an age like ours, to be herded at the point of the bayonet into a tin-pot temple to hear a gramophone in a surplice droning out an unintelligible rigmarole every Sunday in the name of religion—why it is not only redundant, it's a blasphemous farce that every decent man must kick against."

In spite of his caustic humour the Major's passion for the Regiment, to which he had given his life, steadfastly refusing all those staff-appointments for which he was so admirably fitted, was genuine as it was profound. Because of it, his much-tried brother officers, who loved him deeply if they feared him not a little, forgave him all. And if he was sadly unorthodox in many respects, as for instance that he was not a hard and fast Conservative, he was jealously orthodox in others as in that contempt for politicians which is almost an obsession amongst the men of his profession, perhaps because to them it falls to pay the price of the mistakes of their masters at Westminster.

The Major and his wife were in brief distinguished from their kind by the fact that they were mentally alive, sympathetic, keen, and knowledgeable. They had passed most of their lives in the East, and were of the few of their fellow-countrymen who had made the most of the opportunities vouchsafed to them. Indeed it was said in the Regiment that what the pair didn't know about India was not worth knowing.

Once at a halt on a route-march Ernie saw the Major, standing gaunt and helmeted in the shade of a banyan tree, take a pace out into the road.

A native, carrying two sealed pitchers slung from the ends of a bamboo, was padding down the road in the dust between the ranks of the soldiers who had fallen out.

The Major spoke to him, then turned to Ernie who was standing by.

"See that man, Caspar," he said quietly. "He's a pilgrim. He's tramped all the way from Hardwar, the source of the Ganges, to get holy water—seven hundred miles. What about that for faith?"

"Fine, sir," said Ernie, with quiet enthusiasm.

"In the days of Chaucer we used to do the same kind of thing in England," continued the Major. "Ever read the 'Canterbury Tales'?"

"Dad's read em to me, sir—in bits like."

The Major moved away.

Close by a group of officers, whose faces clearly showed how profoundly they disapproved of this conversation, were sprawling in the shade. That was the way to lose caste with the men. Amongst them was a last-joined lad, chubby still; the other was Mr. Royal of Ernie's company.

"What did the Major say he was?" asked the Boy keenly.

"I don't know what the Major said he was," answered Mr. Royal coolly. "And between ourselves I don't greatly care. I know what he was. And if you'll ask me prettily I might impart my information."

"What was he?" asked the Boy.

"He was a coolie," said Mr. Royal. "India's full of them. In fact they're the dominant class."

"I thought he looked something a bit out of the ordinary," said the snubbed Boy.

"Did you?" retorted Mr. Royal. "I thought myself he looked as if he wanted kicking. And as I've got five years' service to your three months it may be presumed that I'm right."

The Regiment was wonderfully well run for the men on its social side, for the Colonel was a bachelor, and much was trusted to Mrs. Lewknor.

She was at Ernie's bedside the day after he had his first attack of fever.

The little lady, so delicate, yet so strong, stood above the lad whose mother she might have been with a curious thrill.

He was so like his father, yet so unlike; and he was not only sick of fever, but dreadfully homesick too.

Mrs. Lewknor knew all about that, and the cure for it.

"Tell me about your people, Caspar," she said, after the ice had been broken.

The lad unloosed the flood-gates with immense relief.

He talked of Beachbourne, of Rectory Walk with the virginia-creeper on the wall and the fig-tree at the back; of his mother, of Mr. Pigott, even of Alf, and all the time of dad and the Downs.

On rising to go, Mrs. Lewknor said that when she came next day she would read to him.

"What shall I read?" she asked.

"Would you read me Matthew Arnold's Scholar-Gypsy?" said the boy.

Mrs. Lewknor looked down at the lad with brilliant eyes.

"Is that your father's favourite?" she asked.

"One of them, 'm. Wordsworth's the one."

There was only one man in the Regiment who possessed a Matthew Arnold, but that man happily was Mrs. Lewknor's husband.

Next day, as the little lady read the familiar lines, Ernie lay with eyes shut, the tears pouring down his face.

"Takes me right back," he said at last as she finished. "I'm not here at all. I'm laying just above the Rabbit-walk over Beech-hangar, with the gorse-pods snapping in the sun, and the beech-leaves stirring beneath me, and old dad with his hat over his eyes and his hands behind his head reciting."

That afternoon Mrs. Lewknor told Mr. Royal, who had dropped in to tea, that she had been reading Matthew Arnold to a man in his company.

Mr. Royal looked blank.

He had cold, speedwell blue eyes, that seemed all the brighter for his curly dark hair, a fine skin, rather pale, and an always growing reputation for hard efficiency.

"Matthew Arnold!" he said. "And who might Mr. Matthew Arnold be?"

He said it a thought aggressively. It was clear that not only had he never heard of Matthew Arnold, but that he would have considered it bad form to have done so.

"I believe he was a poet who seldom went to church," said the Major in the chi-chi voice which he could imitate to the life.

"Indeed," said Mr. Royal. "A poet!—Ah, I'm too busy for that sort of thing myself." He said it with a crushing air of finality.

When he had gone, Mrs. Lewknor looked at her husband with deprecatory eyes.

"My Jock," she said with a little sigh, "tell me!—Is it the system?—is it the man?—What is it?"

The Major sat upright on a little hard chair.

His eyes twinkled maliciously in his somewhat bony head. He looked like a gaunt satyr.

"My dear," he said, "in the British Army you must do as the British Army does. And there is one thing which the British Army Will Not tolerate, and that is—a cultivated mind."

"I don't think that's peculiar to the Army," replied Mrs. Lewknor. "The attitude's characteristic of our race."

Mr. Royal was not in fact popular among his brother officers. His superiors complained that his manner was slightly insolent, his juniors that it was so damn superior. The men liked him for his efficiency, and some women admired him—too much it was whispered.

Mrs. Lewknor followed Ernie's military career with quiet interest. Not that there was very much to follow: for Ernie, apart from the cricket-field, had no career.

He did not seek promotion, and was not in fact offered it. As Mr. Royal very truly said,—"He can't come it enough to make an N.C.O." The habit of authority indeed sat ill on his shoulders; but he was liked by officers and men; and his cricket gave him a place in the regimental team.

But there was little in Army life to do for Ernie the one thing essential self demands—encourage growth; and not a little to repress it.

When the first newness had worn off, Ernie was spiritually unsatisfied and solitary.

The grosser vices of the men never appealed to him, and the men themselves were not his sort. To get away from them he sometimes wandered far a-field, poking and prying into the temples of the various sects, and not seldom found himself in the crowded streets of the native city, a lonely khaki figure in a sun-helmet, regarding the many-coloured crowd, and asking himself, in the philosophical way he inherited from his father,

"What's the meaning of it all?"

It was on one of these rambles that the solitary incident of his career in India occurred to him.

He was standing at the foot of the hill in the native city of Lahore, watching the traffic in the narrow streets, when he saw a mem-sahib driving a tum-tum slowly through the heavy ox-traffic.

The syce for some reason had descended, and the lady was alone.

Just then a huge elephant with painted sides came swinging down the steep street, at the head of a religious procession, singing and clashing cymbals.

The lady's pony, a dun country-bred, took fright and bolted.

Ernie saw her face, quite calm beneath her solar topee, as she rushed past him, pulling at the run-away. It was Mrs. Lewknor.

A few yards down the street the wheels of the tum-tum cannoned into a sack borne by a small donkey. The donkey, already tottering beneath his load, collapsed and lay in the dust unable to rise.

The driver of the donkey, an unsavoury giant, pock-marked, abused the mem-sahib. A crowd gathered. The religious procession was held up, the elephant swinging his trunk discontentedly and spouting showers of dust over his flanks.

Ernie didn't like the look of things, for it was common talk in the lines that the native city was mutinous.

He came up quickly. The presence of the man in khaki steadied the crowd and stopped the chatter.

"Best get out of this, 'm," he suggested. "They look a bit funny."

He took the pony's head and turned him.

"You get up alongside me then," said Mrs. Lewknor.

He obeyed.

The crowd made way. The pock-marked man began again to beat his donkey. The procession resumed its march.

"One up for the Hammer-men!" the little lady laughed, as they emerged from the gate of the native city.

"Yes, 'm," said Ernie. "Only one thing. The native city's out of bounds for me."

Mrs. Lewknor smiled.

"I'm not one of the Military Police," she said....

That evening she put to her husband a question that had often puzzled her.

"Why doesn't Caspar get on?" she asked. "He's got twice the intelligence of men who go over his head."

"My dear," replied the Major with the sententiousness that grew on him with the greying years, "intelligence is the last thing we want in the ranks of the Army. Intelligence always leads to indiscipline. The Army wants in the lower ranks only one thing—what is called 'character.' And by character it means the quality of the bull who rammed his head against a brick-wall till he was unconscious and went at it again when he came round saying—My head is bloody but unbowed."

During Ernie's years of service the Battalion moved slowly North, exchanging the plains of the Central Provinces for the frosty nights and red sand-hills of the Punjauh.

Major Lewknor became Colonel; and Mr. Royal adjutant.

Ern and the new Colonel were curiously sympathetic; Ern and the adjutant the reverse.

It may be that the Colonel, unusual himself, and lonely because of it, recognized a kindred spirit in the man; it may be that he never forgot that Ern was the son of his old contemporary Hathri Caspar of Trinity; or perhaps Mrs. Lewknor played an unconscious part in the matter. It is certain that on the one occasion Ern was brought before him in the Orderly Room for a momentary lapse into his old weakness, the Colonel merely "admonished" the offender.

Captain Royal, a ruthless disciplinarian, was aggrieved.

"He's such a rotten slack soldier, sir," he complained, after the culprit, congratulating himself upon his escape, had disappeared.

"Isn't he?" said the Colonel, enjoying to the full the irritation of his subordinate. "That man'd be no earthly good except on service."

Even at the wicket indeed Ernie was only at his best when he had to try. A first-rate natural bat, he would have been left out of the regimental team for slackness but that, as the Sergeant-Major said,

"Caspar's always there when you want him most."

In fact, Ernie ended his career in the Army with something of a flourish.

The Regiment was playing the Rifle Brigade at Rawlpindi in the last round for the Holkar Cup. Half-way through the second day, when the Hammer-men were batting, a rot set in. There were still two hours to play when the last man went in.

"Who is it?" asked Mrs. Lewknor, keen as a knife.

"Your friend, Caspar, Mrs. Lewknor," answered the senior subaltern, one Conky Joe, with the beak of a penguin, the eyes of an angel, and the heart of a laughter-loving boy. "They're sending him in last for his sins in the field—which were many and grievous."

"He won't live long against their fast bowler," commented the Boy gloomily. "I know Caspar."

"I never like to differ from my superiors," said the Colonel. "But I'm not so sure."

"Nor am I," said Mrs. Lewknor defiantly.

The Colonel and his wife proved right. Ernie batted with astonishing confidence from the first. At the end of twenty minutes it was anybody's game. Royal, well into his second century, was flogging the ball all over the ground. And Ernie's clear voice—"Yes, sir! No, sir! Stay where you are!" gave new heart to the watching Hammer-men.

In the end the two men played out time with consummate ease, and were carried together off the ground.

"It was like bowling at two rocks," said one of the defeated side.

"Spiteful rocks too!" replied the other. "Stood up and slashed at you!"

The Colonel went up and shook hands with the victorious batsmen, and Mrs. Lewknor waved her parasol.

"Well done, Caspar!" she cried. "Stuck it out!"

A few days later, his time being up, Ernie was detailed for a draft for home.

The Colonel, on signing his papers, said that he was sorry to be parting, and meant it.

"Charming fellow!" he said to the Adjutant, when Ern had left the room.

"Yes," answered Captain Royal in his lofty way. "Too charming. He'll never be any good to himself or us either."

"I'm not so sure," replied the Colonel. "He's the sort that never does well except when he's got to."

That evening Ern went up to the Colonel's bungalow to say good-bye to Mrs. Lewknor.

"Where are you going?" asked the little lady.

"Back home, 'm," Ernie answered. "Old Town, Beachbourne. There's no place in the world to touch it."

Mrs. Lewknor smiled at his enthusiasm.

"I know it," she said. "The Colonel comes from those parts—Hailsham-way. Perhaps we shall follow you when we retire."

"Beachbourne!" mused the Colonel, after Ernie had departed. "Famous for two things: Mr. Trupp, the surgeon, who by a brilliant operation saved the other day the life of the man the world could have done best without, and the Hohenzollern Hotel."

"What's the Hohenzollern Hotel?" asked Mrs. Lewknor.

"My dear," said the Colonel, "Captain Royal will enlighten you in his more intimate moments."

CHAPTER XXI
THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER

That first return to England after his long absence in the East always remained one of the land-marks in Ernie's life. It was a revelation to him, never completely to pass away.

The time was late April; the weather perfect. The song of mating birds rose from dew-drenched brake and bush on every hand; the spring lay like a dream of gossamer on the hedges and woodlands; the lambs and quiet cattle filled him with an immense content. His heart rose up in joy and thankfulness and humble love.

And his mates, it was clear to him, were experiencing the same transfiguring emotion. He was sure of it from the silence that grew on them as they travelled through the radiant country-side from the port at which they had landed, their noses glued to the windows of the troop-train. Gradually the vision possessed their souls like lovely music. The rowdiness, the silly songs, the bad jokes faded away. An awe stole over them as of men admitted into the Sanctuary and beholding there for the first time the beauty of the Holy One unveiled before them.

Now and then a quiet voice spoke out of the silence.

"Blime! There's a rabbit!"

"There's an English serving-maid!"

"Ain't it all solid-like?"

That solidity was one of Ernie's abiding impressions too—the massive character of this Western Civilization to which he was returning. And it stood, he was convinced, for something real: for it was based on a foundation that only the blind and gross could call materialism.

The big-boned porters trundling tinkling milk-cans along the platforms at a wayside station, the English faces, the square brick buildings, the substantial coin, confirmed the thought.

"Solid!" he echoed in his father's vein. "That's the word. Give me the West. Back there it's all a little bit o gilded gimcrack."

Once the train stopped in an embankment lined with primroses and crowned with woods, a sweet undercurrent of song streaming quietly up to heaven, like the murmur of innumerable fairy-bees.

Ernie removed his cap; and the unuttered words in his heart, as in those of his companions, were, "Let us pray!"

A few weeks later he stood on the platform of Victoria, discharged.

Deliberately he chose, to take him home, a train that stopped and browsed at all the stations with the familiar English names as it made its fussy way across the Weald through the very heart of Saxondom.

He sat in the corner, the window wide, the breeze upon his face, without a paper, reading instead the countryside as a man reads in age a poem beloved in his youth.

One by one he picked up the old land-marks—the spire of Cowfold Monastery, slender against the West, Ditchling Beacon, Black Cap, and the Devil's Dyke.

At Ardingly, where the train had stopped, it seemed, for lunch, he got out.

The Downs were drawing closer now, the blue rampart of them seeming to gather all this beauty as in a giant basin.

In the woods hard by a woodpecker was tapping. He saw a cock pheasant streaming in glorious flight over a broad-backed hedge. And across the hollow of the Weald cuckoos everywhere were calling, and flying as they called. He closed his eyes and listened. The Weald seemed to him an immense bowl of nectar, brimming and beaded. He was floating in it; and the tiny bubbles all about him were popping off with a soft delicious sound—Cuck-oo! Cuck-oo!

Then he came to earth to see the train bundling out of the station with a callous grin.

It was significant of Ernie's weakness and his strength that he didn't mind. Indeed he was glad.

He left the station and plunged like a swimmer into the sea of sound and colour, opening his chest and breathing it in. The wealth of green amazed him. It filled and fulfilled his heart. He caught it up in both hands, as it were, and poured it over his thirsting flesh. Abundant, yet light as froth, it overflowed all things, hedges, woods and pastures; splashing with brightest emerald the walls and roofs of the cottages, russet-timbered and Sussex-tiled.

Here and there in an old garden, set in the green, was a laburnum like a fountain of gold, a splash of lilac in lovely mourning against the yews, a chestnut lighted with a myriad spray of bloom. The pink May had succeeded the white; and clematis garlanded the hedges. There was a wonderful stillness everywhere, and the atmosphere was bright and hard. After a dry month the grass was very forward. The oak-trees stood up to their knees in hay that was yellow with buttercups, the wind rustling through it like a tide. The foliage of the oaks was still faintly bronzed. Steadfast, old, and very grim in all this faerie, they bore themselves as lords of the Forest by right of conquest and long inheritance. Ernie nodded greeting at them. Their uncompromising air amused him. They were not his tree: for he was a hill-man; and the oaks belonged to the Weald, which in its turn clearly belonged to them. He did not love them; but he admired and respected them for their sturdy independence of character, if he laughed a little at their English self-righteousness and dogmatic air. They were of England too in their determination not to show emotion: for they appeared not to be moving; yet he could see a wind was flowing through them, while in the shadow of them mares-in-foal were flicking their tails.

Ernie recognized with joy that he was returning to the country he had left.

The gang of men he came on at the end of a lane, asphalting a main-road, the rare car dashing along with a swirling tail of dust between green hedges, disturbed but little his peace of mind.

He was home again—in Old England—the heart of whose heart was Sussex.

In the train again he sank back in a kind of pleasant trance. Two country-men in his carriage were talking in the old ca-a-ing speech—So cardingly I saays to herrr.... Their undulating voices rocked him to sleep. He woke to find himself in Lewes, and his eyes resting on the massif of Mount Caburn.

The train wandered eastwards under the Downs, past Furrel Beacon, athwart the opening of the Ruther Valley. The Long Man of Wilmington stared bleakly at him from the flanks of hills that seemed sometimes scarred and old and worn, at others rich with the mystery of youth.

The train ran through Polefax, where the line to Romney Marsh turns off. Then with a belated effort at sprightliness it hurried through the sprawling outposts of Beachbourne.

The town had grown greatly, overspreading the foothills towards Ratton and the woods of the Decoy and skirmishing across the marshes beyond the gasworks, which, when he left, had marked the uttermost bounds of civilization.

CHAPTER XXII
OLD TOWN

When Ern got out of the train on to the very platform where Alf, six years before, had prophesied his return in glory, nothing much happened.

True, the conditions were not quite as Alf had foretold. Rather the reverse. Whereas it was a dapper young clerk who had left Beachbourne, it was a solid working-man who returned to it; one who by his clothes, boots, hands, hair, and even walk, testified that he was of those who bear on their shoulders the burden of our industrial civilization. And that perhaps was why the promised brass-band was conspicuous by its absence, and there were present no fathers of the city expanding ample paunches preparatory to delivering an address of welcome to the returning soldier. Instead there was upon the platform one unkempt porter, who took his ticket very casually, and when asked by Ern whether he recognized him, replied with more honesty than tact that he didn't know but thought not.

"See, I sees so many," he remarked apologetically.

"I'm Ernie Caspar," said Ernie, noting with critical military eye that the other did not seem to have had his hair cut since last they met. "I was at the Moot School along o you. Aaron Huggett, aren't it?"

The porter's face betrayed a flicker of sardonic interest.

"I expagt you'll be Alf Caspar's brother," he said.

"That's it," Ernie answered, a thought sourly.

Back in Beachbourne he was not himself; he was just his younger brother's brother, it seemed.

Things were not quite as he had expected. Everywhere was a subtle change of atmosphere. Beside the book-stall now stood a sentry-box with glass doors. In it a man with something to his ear was talking to himself.

Ernie felt somehow disconsolate.

Outside the station, in Cornfield Road, he paused and took in the scene.

There was more traffic than of old, and it was swifter. In the country from which he came the ox was still the principal motive-power upon the roads: here clearly horses were becoming out of date.

He asked a policeman when the bus for Old Town ran.

"There she is," said the man, pointing. "On the bounce!"

Just across the street, under the particular plane-tree the starlings haunted of evenings, where in the past old Huggett in his bottle-green coat would wait indefinitely with his mouldy pair of browns, there stood a gaudy motor-bus, decked on top. A spruce conductor was pulling the bell sharply; and a board on which were printed the starting-times hung from a neighbouring lamp. It was all very precise, powerful, and efficient. Ernie was not sure whether he liked it or not.

But he had little time to think. This mechanical monster was not the old gentlemanly horse-bus with its easy tolerance. It gave no law and knew no mercy. It was swift and terrible; and its heart was of the same stuff as its engines.

He crossed the road and leapt on to the great lurching thing.

Carelessly it bore him along the Old Road to Lewes and then swung away under the Chestnuts into Water Lane.

Here at least nothing had changed but the vehicle that carried him. On his left was Saffrons Croft, just as of old, with its group of splendid elms and the Downs seen through the screen of them; in front on the hill, above the roofs of Old Town, the church-tower with its squat spire, bluff against a background of green.

Two ladies were walking down the hill, a middle-aged and gracious mother, escorted by a tall daughter.

Ernie's neighbour nudged him confidentially.

"Mrs. Trupp," he said.

Ernie leaned over. Except for the silver in her hair, his god-mother had altered little; but he would hardly have recognized in the stately young woman who walked at her side the flapper who had waved him good-bye from the nursery-window years before.

His neighbour was conveying to him information about the great surgeon.

"He's our greatest man by far. Mr. Trupp of Beachbourne. They come from all parts to him. He saved the Tsar of Dobrudja—when all the rest had taken to their prayers."

"Ah," said Ernie, "I think I ave eard of im."

The bus, for all its rushing manners of a parvenu, stopped opposite the Star; but the old beam across the road was gone.

Ernie felt himself aggrieved, and complained to the conductor as he got down.

"Well, you didn't want your head took off every time, did you?" said that unsympathetic worthy.

Ernie strolled up Church Street, living his past over again. Here at least he found the rich, slow atmosphere he had expected. There was the long-backed church standing massive and noble as of old on its eminence above the Moot; beneath it in the hollow the brown roof of the Quaker Meeting-house; and on his left the little ironmonger's shop outside which Alf had seen Mrs. Pigott and her dog Sharkie on the fatal day they sacked the walnut-tree.

At Billing's Corner he was reassured to find the high flint-wall that ran at the back of Rectory Walk making its old sharp corner and the fig-tree peeping over it. The Rectory, too, still stood in pharisaic aloofness amid gloomy evergreens. And out of it was coming the Rector, walking mincingly just as of yore.

That finikin old man had not changed much at all events, and yet ... and yet ... as he came closer, Ernie was aware of some subtle spiritual difference here too. At first he thought the Rector had grown. Then he recognized that the change was in the top-hat and those tall attenuated legs. They were clothed in gaiters now, and gave the wearer just that air of old-world distinction it was his passion to assume.

In fact pseudo-Canon Willcocks had in Ernie's absence become Archdeacon, to his own ineffable satisfaction and that of his lady. Now he marched down the middle of the road with his hands behind his back, in the meditative pose he always hoped passers-by would mistake for prayer.

Ernie touched his hat; and the Archdeacon with an air of royal indifference imitated to the life from his hero, the late Emperor of the French, acknowledged the salute with an "Ah! my friend!" and titupped delicately upon his way.

Ernie, grinning, turned the corner and stopped short.

He had little notion as to what was before him.

During his absence his mother's letters, it is true, had been very regular and most curt. It was indeed astonishing how little she had contrived to tell him. His father, on the other hand, had written seldom but at length, yet never mentioning home-news; while Alf, of course, had not written at all.

Ernie was therefore in the dark as to the welcome awaiting him.

The Downs at the end of the Walk greeted him; but a row of red-brick villas on the far side the New Road imposed a barrier between him and them. True, they nodded at him friendly over the intruding roofs; but he was shut out from the great Coombe which of old had gathered the shadows in the evening and echoed in the spring to the melancholy insistent cry of lambs.

All around the builder had been busy.

When he left, the windows of Rectory Walk had looked across over rough fields to the Golf Links and Beech-hangar beyond. Now detached houses on the westward side of the road blocked the view.

His own home at least had changed not at all. The virginia-creeper was brilliant as ever on its walls; the arabis humming with bees beneath the study-window.

As he passed through the gate, his mother, who must have been waiting, opened to him quietly, and held up a warning finger.

She was beautiful still, but showing wear, as must a woman of fifty, who has never spared herself. Her hair was now snow-white; her complexion, as seen in the passage, fine as ever; her eyes the same startling blue under fierce brows, but the lines about them had an added kindness.

She led past the study-door into the kitchen, walking a little stiffly, her bones more apparent than of old.

Ern followed her with a smile, his hand scraping the familiar varnished paper, his eye catching that of the converted drain-pipe.

She was still clearly a woman of one idea—dad.

Cautiously his mother closed the door of the kitchen behind him. Then she turned and put her hands upon his shoulders.

There was something yearning in her gesture as of a puzzled child asking an explanation. Ern's quick intuitions told him that since he had last seen her his mother had lost something and was missing it. This he noticed and her hands—how worn they were. Fondly he kissed them, realizing a little wistfully that his mother now was an old woman.

She smiled at him.

"Let me see you," she said, and her eyes dwelt upon his face. For the first time in his life he felt that his mother was depending on him, and was moved accordingly.

"You're changed," she said at last. "You're a man now. But your eyes are the same."

"How's dad?" he asked.

She withdrew from his arms and turned away.

"He's an old man now, Ernie," she said.... "He's not what he was.... I don't rightly know what to make of him.... He goes to Meeting now." She was puzzled and pathetic.

"Has he turned Quaker?" asked Ernie.

"He says not."

Just then quiet music sounded from the study.

"Is that dad?" asked Ernie, amazed.

His mother nodded.

"One of them new-fangled machines. Pianolas, don't they call em? I give him one for his birthday."

Ernie listened in awed silence.

"That's Beethoven," he said. "I'd know it anywhere.... In old days we used to have to go out for that, me and dad did."

The music ceased.

"Now," said his mother, and opened the kitchen-door.

CHAPTER XXIII
THE CHANGED MAN

Ernie went to the study-door and knocked.

"Come in," said a voice that surprised him by its firmness.

He entered.

His father stood before the fireplace almost as he had left him, save that he had discarded his dressing-gown for a loose long-tailed morning-coat of the kind worn by country gentlemen in the eighties. Physically he had changed very little, spiritually it was clear at the first glance that he was another man. The dignity which had distinguished him at the moment of parting had become his permanent possession. Some shining wind of the spirit blowing through his stagnant streets had purged him thoroughly. His colour was fresh as a child's, his eyes steady and hopeful, and there was a note of quiet exaltation about him, of expectation.

"Boy-lad," he said in deeper tones than of old, as they shook hands.

Ernie looked round like one lost.

The room, too, was as greatly changed as its inmate. But for a bowl of crimson roses on the book-shelf it might have been called austere. The Persian rug had gone, the writing-table was bare of the familiar manuscript. The book-shelves had disappeared to make way for a piano. The walls were still brown, and from them Lely's Cavalier looked down with faintly ironical eyes upon his descendants. It was the only picture on the walls.

"Where are the books then, dad?" Ernie asked.

"I sent them down to Fowler's," the other answered. "I've done with books—all except those."

He pointed to a single row, perhaps a dozen in all, among which Ernie recognized the blue backs of the Golden Treasury Series, the old edition of Wordsworth, homely as the poet himself, and a little brown-paper bound new Testament.

Ernie sat down. Now he understood that pathetic look in his mother's eyes. His father was no longer dependent on her; and she was missing that dependency as only a woman who has given her life to propping an invalid can miss it.

"Have you joined the Friends, dad?" he asked earnestly.

The old man shook his head.

"I shall never join another sect. They're nearest the Truth, it seems to me—a long way nearest. But they aren't there yet. None of us are."

Ernie considered his father, sitting opposite him as of old, and yet how changed! In those familiar blue eyes he detected now a dry twinkle, as of an imp dancing amid autumn leaves.

Suddenly the imp leapt out and tickled him.

Ernie flung back in his chair and laughed.

The old man opposite nodded sympathetically.

Then the door in the hall opened.

Somebody had entered the passage, and was stumbling over the bag Ernie had left there.

Ernie ceased to laugh; and the imp to twinkle.

"That's your brother," said the old man almost harshly.

Ernie made no move. In the passage outside Alf was shifting the bag—with curses.

"Does he live here still?" asked Ernie, low.

"Yes," said his father. "He's got a garage of his own now. He's getting on."

"Shall I go and see him?" asked Ernie.

"There's nothing to see," his father answered in that new dry note of his. "But you'd better go and see it perhaps," he added.

Ernie rose reluctantly and went into the passage. Alf's voice came from the kitchen, dogmatic and domineering.

"Him or me. That's flat," he was saying. "House won't hold us both."

Ernie swaggered into the kitchen.

Alf was standing before the fire, very smart and well-groomed. He wore a double-breasted waistcoat, festooned by a watch-chain, from which hung a bronze cross. A little man still, with an immense head, his shoulders appeared broad in their padded coat; but the creases in his waistcoat betrayed his hollow chest and defective physique, and his legs were small and almost shrunken in their last year's Sunday trousers.

Ernie advanced on his brother.

"All right, Alf, old son," he said. "No need to get yer shirt out. I'm not a-goin to force myself on no one."

"Al-fred, if you please," answered Alf, planted before the fire and caressing a little waxed moustache, which had come into being during Ernie's absence.

"Oh, you are igh," laughed Ernie.

"I am Al-fred to me own folk and Mr. Caspar to the rest," answered Alf, dogged and unbending.

"Come, Alf, shake hands with your brother!" scolded his mother.

Alf, his eyes still averted, extended a surly hand mechanically from the shoulder.

Ern, white and flashing, took the hand.

"There's for my brother!" he said. "And there's for Alf!" and tossed it from him.

Then he went out.

His bag was still in the hall. He was about to take it up when his father called him from the study.

"You're going to stop here?" he asked; and Ernie detected a touch of the old anxiety in his voice, a suggestion of the old tremulousness in his face and figure.

In all the tuzzles between the two brothers, Alf had over Ern the incalculable material advantage of the man who is not a gentleman over the man who is.

"I just got to go down and see Mr. Pigott after a job, dad," Ern answered soothingly. "I'll be round again later."

He went out of the house, shutting the door quietly behind him.

Anne Caspar heard it go, and looking out into the passage saw that the bag had vanished too.

"He's gone," she said.

"Army manners," muttered Alf.

"You've drove him out," continued his mother.

"Ave I?" said Alf, cleaning his nails with a penknife. "I got my way to make. I don't want no angers-on to me.... Comin back on us a common soldier—not so much as a stripe to his arm, let alone a full sergeant. A fair disgrace on the family, I call it."

"All for yourself always," said his mother censoriously.

"Who else'd I be for then?" asked Alf, genuinely indignant.

"You might be for the church," answered Anne grimly.

CHAPTER XXIV
ALF

If Ernie was now the working-man, Alf on his side was very much the gentleman.

He dressed the part to the best of his ability; and—when he remembered—even tried to talk it.

But he had not arrived at his present position without a struggle.

When he was through his apprenticeship, he left Hewson & Clarke, and inducing his mother to lend him a little capital, started a car and garage of his own in the Chestnuts between Old Town and the station.

At first he did not prosper. The horse-industry, with a tradition of tens of thousands of years behind it, would not yield its pride of place without a struggle. Competitors were many and fierce. And just when he believed that he was finding his feet at last, a big London Syndicate started the Red Cross Garages throughout Kent and Sussex.

Alf for the first time felt the full weight of capitalism—the Juggernaut with Mammon at the wheel that crushes beneath its rollers the bodies and souls of the weak and impotent.

His sense of helplessness embittered him.

His garage was empty; his car in little request; he had few repairs. Old Town at one end of Beachbourne and Holywell on the foot-hills under Beau-nez at the other were the quarters of the resident aristocracy amongst whom it was the convention to avoid "the front" as bad form. These clung to their sleek pairs and cockaded coachmen just as they clung to the Church and Joseph Chamberlain and the belief, so often re-affirmed by Archdeacon Willcocks, that Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was the one man living who knew how to rule the masses. The firm hand, sir!

The doctors, on the other hand, were beginning to possess little cars of their own which they drove themselves or had driven for them; while the progressive Town Council started motor buses and deprived Alf of some station-work. Mr. Pigott, now a radical alderman, was responsible for this last injustice.

Alf knew it, and in revenge, ceased to attend chapel.

Mr. Pigott, with an unerring eye for the defaulters of his flock, marked his absence and tackled the lost sheep on the subject.

"You've given up God then!" he said, fierce and frowning.

"There ain't none," answered Alf, as brief and brutal. "Where there's no justice, there can't be no God." His little eyes sparkled dreadfully. "Look at young Albert Hewson. He went through the shops with me. Is he as good an engineer as me?—Can he strip an engine same as me?—Can he turn to the thousandth part of an inch?—Ask the chaps in the yard. Yet because he's got all the money, been to Rugby and Oxford, they make him deputy-chairman of the Red Cross Syndicate at £1,000 a year straight from the shop, and Managing Director of Ball-Bearings, Limited, and I don't know what all."

He became a violent Socialist; spent his Sundays attending Labour demonstrations in the East-end; read Robert Blatchford in the Clarion; and sulked with his mother.

For a moment he even contemplated the abandonment of his ambitions.

When Mr. Pigott, after his second marriage, finally gave up schoolmastering and became Manager of the Southdown Transport Company, Alf applied for the position of working foreman.

The application was discussed at a meeting of the Directors.

"He's the chap that made the wage-slave speech to the Engineers at the Salvation Army Citadel on Labour Day," said one.

"What d'you think, Pigott?" asked another.

"I won't have Alf Caspar in my yard," replied the Manager with characteristic emphasis. "I know Alf."

"Then that settles it," said the chairman.

Alf rightly attributed his defeat to his old schoolmaster.

"So you've turned me down, Mr. Pigott," he said, stopping the other in Church Street a few days later.

Mr. Pigott, like most professing pacifists, was always ready for a fight.

"I thought you wanted to be a master-man!" he cried. "And here you're applying for a job as a wage-slave—to use your own term."

Alf was white, trembling, and sour-faced.

"All I want is a fair chance," he said doggedly. "And if I don't get it there'll be trouble." He came a step closer. His eyes were down, and he looked dangerous. "See here, Mr. Pigott—if you turn on full-steam same time you seal up the safety-valve, something'll burst. That's science, that is."

Mr. Pigott was not at all dismayed.

"Now look here!" he said. "You take a pull, young man. You're going altogether too far and too fast. And I'm speaking not as a magistrate but as your old school-master."

At the Bowling Green Committee that evening, while the minutes were being read, he retailed the incident to Mr. Trupp.

"That little ewe-lamb o yours is turning tiger because he can't have it all his own way," he said. "Going to upset Society because he's not King."

Mr. Trupp was amused.

"Arrested development," he said. "He's an interesting study in pathology."

"Criminal pathology," muttered Mr. Pigott.

Whether in the interests of Science, or of expediency, next day Mr. Trupp rolled into Alf's garage, with a blue long-dog, a descendant of the original She, wearing the studded collar of her ancestress, at his heels.

No man had made a stiffer fight against the new and aggressive locomotive than the great surgeon.

Pests of the road, he called them, and refused to recognize his friends when driving them. He affirmed that they upset his horses and his patients; made the place stink; and whirled through the country-side disseminating disease in clouds of dust. But he was no fool, and increasingly busy. A machine that could whisk him over to Lewes in little more than thirty minutes, and land him at the Metropole in Brighton in the hour, was not to be scoffed at.

Alf was cleaning his car when Mr. Trupp, greatly muffled in spite of the heat, strolled into his yard.

"Look here, Alf," growled the great man. "I'm never going to own one of those things. But I've got to use one to get about. If you like to do my driving we'll arrange something."

Alf's attitude to life changed in the twinkling of an eye.

He bustled home that evening, a new man.

"All O.K.," he called to his mother. "I got me first contract."

"What?" she asked sullenly.

"Driving for Mr. Trupp."

She took a saucepan off the fire.

"Then you're a made man," she said; and she did not exaggerate.

The job, or as Alf preferred to call it, the contract, meant honour; it meant money; it meant—above all—a start. Mr. Trupp had been for long the first surgeon in Sussex: since the operation, as daring as discreet, by which he had preserved the life of a Balkan Tsar to disgrace a throne, his fame had become world-wide.

That evening, uplifted on a wave of humility and thankfulness, Alf walked to Mr. Pigott's house and apologized to him.

"I said a lot of silly things, I know," he said. "There is a God and a good God too."

Mr. Pigott was sitting with his new wife, who was as much his junior as the first had been his senior.

She was a young woman, with a mischievous face and bright hair.

"He'll be glad to have you on His side again," she remarked demurely. "He was missing you."

Mr. Pigott scowled melodramatically at the offender.

She refused to catch his eye, busy with her work.

"Five pound a week isn't a bad God as times go," she went on.

Alf smirked.

"It's seven pound ten," he said, and withdrew.

"Elsie Pigott!" roared her husband, when the outside door had shut.

"Sir!" answered his bride, and added—"Mr. Trupp's taken him on.... Mrs. Trupp's furious...."

Alf, in spite of his access of faith, never returned to chapel.

As he remarked to his mother,

"I got me principles. And I must stick to em."

"That's it," said his mother. "Stick to em—until you want to change em."

Anne Caspar cherished now no illusions about her second son.

She no longer cared for Alf—for he was no longer dependent on her; nor did she respect him. But his naÏvetÉ, the outrageous sincerity of his egotism, appealed to a certain grim sense of humour she possessed.

CHAPTER XXV
THE CHURCHMAN

Alf, with all his faults, had at least the supreme virtue of the animal living in a fiercely competitive world: he never missed a chance.

A year after he began to drive for Mr. Trupp, he had a second car, a man driving for him, and another on repairing work.

Success sugared his political outlook, just as defeat had soured it. Like most really hard men, he saved himself in his own eyes by becoming a thorough-going sentimentalist. In the course of a year or two, King and Country had become the objects of his ferocious admiration; while the masses of his countrymen were to be dealt with as ruthlessly as expediency and the Vote would allow.

"Traitors, I call em," he confided to his new friend, the Reverend Spink. "All for their fat selves all the time. Never think of you and me. They fair give me the hiccoughs."

At the General Election of 1906 he came out fearlessly for God and the Conservative Party.

The two candidates for West Beachbourne were, as all decent men admitted, the worst who ever stood for a constituency. The sitting member had just received that which he entered Parliament to obtain—a Baronetcy; and his solitary ambition now was to be defeated. Unfortunately an aspiring wife had other views to which her spouse had to give way.

His opponent, on the other hand, had, according to the enemy, recently emerged "from a home of rest" in order to contest the constituency.

At the preceding Khaki Election the Conservative candidate, who was an undoubtedly fine whip, had secured the "Triumph of Right," as Archdeacon Willcocks finely called it, by the simple process of driving a well-appointed team through the constituency.

"I'll vote for them 'orses," had been the general verdict.

The victor now repeated his tactics.

On polling day, as a reward for his strenuous labours in the good cause, Alf was given a ride on the top of the coach among the very pick of England's aristocracy. In that fair company he meandered from public-house to public-house all a winter's afternoon, singing with his hosts hymns and spirituous songs.

In Cornfield Road, opposite the White Hart, Mr. Pigott, red and dusty from the battle, saw him ensconced on that bad eminence among the crimson faces and flowery hats of the enemy.

"You've changed your coat to some purpose," he bawled.

Alf leaned down.

"Yes, sir," he said quietly. "I've learned a bit, and I'm not ashamed to admit it."

The beery riders raised an aggressive cheer. And the son and heir of the candidate, snatching the horn from the hand of a footman, blew a strident blast in the ear of the outraged schoolmaster.

Alf's candidate was returned, to his no small chagrin—one of the few Tories to survive the democratic deluge of that year.

"Just a remnant of us," as Alf remarked pathetically to the Archdeacon, "that 'as not bowed the knee to Bile."

Thus earlier in life even than most of us, Alf joined the Big Battalions of those who, secure themselves, mean to make capital out of the insecurity of others.

"I'm a high old Tory," he would tell Lady Augusta Willcocks truculently. "And I don't care who knows it."

And finding quickly the necessity for, and advantage of, a religious sanction for a position that was morally untenable, he threw himself upon the bosom of the Church; and in that comfortable and accommodating community which opens wide its gates to all who prefer the Path of Compromise to the Road that leads up Calvary, he found the sustenance of which he stood in need.

Alf effected the change of religious community with considerable tact.

He began quite simply by touching his hat to the junior curate of the parish church, when he met him in the street.

The Reverend Spink, who was a man of much the same class as Alf, was highly gratified and uplifted.

Then Alf took to saying very shyly,

"Good morning, sir," hurrying past in order not to impede by his unworthy presence the great man's view.

Next he took to dropping in to the Reverend Spink's addresses for "men only."

Here he made himself conspicuous by his thoughtfulness and the corrugations in his brow as he imbibed the teachings of his master.

One day he asked, with some confusion and stumblings of speech, a question so easy that even the curate could answer it.

Alf nodded, well satisfied.

The curate swelled in the spirit. This catechumen at the least knew what was what.

Next day Alf, greatly daring, stopped the evangelist in the street.

"Beg pardon, sir," he began diffidently. "About what you was saying last night about them Proper Prefaces..."

The curate amplified his explanation.

Alf drank in the milk of the Word, nodding his head.

"Ah, I never thought of that!" he said.

"Look here!" said the curate with sudden warmth. "If you're interested in those sort of things..."

The naughty devil who possessed Alf bobbed out and almost undid him.

"What!—Proper Prefaces!" he said, and added hastily—"and the things appertaining to em!—religion and that."

"That's what I mean," said the curate. "Come round to my rooms on Friday. Some of us meet there once a week. Jolly fellows. Come and smoke a pipe and chat!"

The Reverend Spink was deeply tainted with the hearty bon-camarade method which the Bishop of Fulham had recently introduced into the Church to enable it to float on the flowing democratic tide.

After that Alf went often.

The curate, who had made inquiries, found that Alf had once been, according to report, "a roaring, raving Socialist and atheist!"

"Shockin the things he used to say!" his informant told him. The curate, who was all out for sensation, was thrilled. Here was a catch indeed!—If he could but bring it off!—What wouldn't the dear Bishop of Fulham say?

His prayers were answered more swiftly than he had anticipated.

In a month the Reverend Spink had led his penitent to the baptismal font.

Alf, asked if he would like any of his people to be present at the ceremony, had shaken his head.

"See where it is, sir, Mother's chapel. She'll never forgive me—not but what I'll put up with that if it's right. And dad's I don't know what. I don't know that he knows himself."

The only people Alf invited to attend were Mrs. Trupp and her daughter. They refused politely.

As Bess said to her mother with the firmness of youth, "We are on Ernie's side. Dad may forget, but we don't."

A few weeks later the Reverend Spink went to call on Alf's father.

After he had left, Mrs. Caspar heard strange sounds in the study. She went to the door and listened.

Then she opened and peeped in.

Edward Caspar was laughing as she had never seen him laugh in twenty odd years of married life. The tears were streaming down his face, his head was thrown back and his body convulsed.

His wife regarded him with dour sympathy.

"What is it?" she asked hardly.

Her husband wiped his eyes shamefacedly.

"Nothing," he said. "Only the curate's been converting me."

That evening, as he went to bed, he peered over the banisters, and said in his grave way to Alf in the kitchen,

"I hope your friend Mr. Spink'll come again."

Alf reported the incident next day to the curate, adding,

"I will say this for dad. He is broad."

Mr. Trupp heard of his chauffeur's conversion.

"You're church then now, Alf," he said.

"Yes, sir," replied the other with the curious naÏvetÉ of blunted susceptibilities. "More classier. See, I'm getting on now."

And Alf did not stop at baptism.

He was thorough in religious as in secular affairs.

Next spring, after a careful preparation by the Reverend Spink, he was confirmed by the Bishop and afterwards admitted a member of the C.E.M.S.

After the ceremony, the Bishop inquired of the Rector, in the vestry, who the young man with the immense head might be.

Archdeacon Willcocks always wore a little white imperial in reverent imitation of his master, Louis Napoleon. His cult of the Third Emperor was perhaps the most genuine thing about him, and had endured for fifty years. But for a stern no-nonsense father he would have deserted Cambridge in '70 to fight for a cause already lost. And he had never forgiven the scholar at his gate who had told him that his favourite had painted his face before Sedan.

"What if he did?" he had asked sourly.

"Nothing," Edward Caspar had answered. "Only it's interesting."

"I don't believe he did."

"Did you never read Zola's DÉbÂcle?" asked the other gently.

"Nevah!" cried the Archdeacon, on firm church-ground now. "I don't read Zolah!"

"Ah," said Edward. "Pity..."

The Archdeacon looked like a gentleman, and, to do him justice, tried hard to live up to his looks. With this end in view he had married—to his no small gratification, and that of his mother—the daughter of a Victorian Earl. In the days before he became an Archdeacon he habitually wore a top-hat, slightly battered to signify that the wearer, while an aristocrat, was not a new one. A sedulous attendant on the rich of the parish, he visited the poor by proxy; and yet by the simple process of taking off his hat with a sweep to every cottage-woman in the Moot who vouchsafed him a good-morning on his rare passages through that district, he maintained an easy reputation among the more conservative of the working-class as a Christian and a gentleman.

Archdeacon Willcocks was in fact a snob, but he was not a cad; whereas his junior curate was both. When, therefore, the Bishop made inquiries as to Alf, the Archdeacon gave the glory to his subordinate.

"Spink got hold of him," he said. "He was a dangerous Socialist, I believe."

The Bishop regarded with approval the chubby young man with the pursed mouth, wondering whether he should transfer him to the industrial East-end or the slums of Portslade.

A thorough-going man of the world, like most of his type, he was quite astute enough to see that the real enemy of the Institution he represented was the Labour Party; and that the danger from this quarter was growing, and would continue to grow.

When Alf returned home from the ceremony in the parish-church, his mother was taking off her bonnet in the kitchen.

She eyed him with sardonic mirth as he entered.

"Feel a change?" she asked.

"What's that?"

"Since he done it."

"Was you there then?" asked Alf.

"I was."

Alf was entirely unabashed.

"I must go with me conscience," he said, "if it was ever so."

"And we all know which way your conscience goes, Alf," his mother answered.

"Which way's that then?"

"The way the money goes."

Alf was not in the least offended. Indeed he was rather pleased. He stood in his favourite position in the window with his back to his mother and cleaned his nails with a pen-knife.

"Crucified for conscience' sake," he muttered. "I dare say I'm not the first, nor I won't be the last neether."

Alf was confirmed into the church, and persecuted for it by his mother, a few weeks before his brother's return home.

CHAPTER XXVI
MR. PIGOTT

Ernie, bag in hand, and sore of heart, sauntered along to the end of Rectory Walk.

There Beech-hangar, swirling in the wind under the shoulder of the Downs that shut off Beau-nez, called to his wounded spirit.

He walked slowly along the New Road, away from the houses, across the Golf Links towards this favourite retreat of his boyhood where of old, when in trouble with his mother, he would retire.

There on the slope amid the beech-trees, the Links billowing away before him to the woods that ambushed the Duke's Lodge, he lay down. The smooth stems rose about him like columns in the choir of a church. The wind strayed amid a sea of sun-lit leaves. The cool, the comfort, the bright graciousness of these comrades of his youth soothed and satisfied him. He studied them with kind eyes. The harsh male quality of the oak was not theirs. They could not stand the buffeting of Time as did the fierce old warriors of the Weald; but they could sustain the spirit in the hour of need. They were for him the women among trees.

Ernie lay with his eyes shut, and his hands behind his head, listening to the wind flowing through the tree-tops. The murmur of flies, the under-song of birds, the moving stillness, the secret stir of life, filled him to overflowing.

Alf had made him feel an isolated atom, the sport of incredibly cruel devils. Now he knew that he was part of an immense and harmonious whole. The sense of dislocation, exile and disease passed away. His mind was an open cistern into which a myriad healing streams were pouring from an unknown source.

Who was Alf to disturb his peace of mind? Alf, the puny, the pretentious, who was not really alive at all. There was something greater in the world than Alf, and that something was on his side. He was sure of it.

He sat up and laughed.

Then above the murmur of insects and birds the louder hum of Man and his machinery, setting the world to rights, stole in upon his mind.

Two groundmen were mowing the green just under the Hangar.

It was time to be moving.

He sauntered back along the New Road, eyeing the spruce villas on the northern side, where of old allotment gardens had been.

At the corner of Church Street he asked a policeman where Mr. Pigott lived now.

The man pointed down the Lewes Road, now fringed with houses.

The old schoolmaster had, it seemed, left Huntsman's Lodge at the foot of the Downs, and moved in nearer to his work when he became Manager of the South Downs Transport Co.

Ernie rambled down the dusty hill, the Downs upon his left, picking up familiar objects as he went—the Moot Farm standing up like an elm-girt island from the sea of arable, the long low backs of the Duke's piggeries, the path that wound across the plough and led over the hill to far Aldwoldston in the Ruther Valley.

A young woman with provocative eyes and brightly burnished hair came to the door at his knock and scanned him friendly.

"Is Mr. Pigott in?" Ernie asked.

"He's at his office."

"Could I see Mrs. Pigott then?"

She eyed him merrily.

"You are seeing her," she said; and added, enjoying his embarrassment, "I'm number two. My predecessor sleeps at the back." She tossed her bright head in the direction of the cemetery on Rodmill seen through the open back-door.

Ernie blushed and fumbled.

"I'm Ernie Caspar, Miss—I would say Ma'am."

The young woman regarded him with swift and sympathetic interest.

"Oh, I know you," she said. "You used to write from India.... So Mr. Pigott never mentioned me! I'll just speak to him when he comes in."

She saw the bag in his hand, and her mouth became firm.

"Been to see your people?"

"Just looked in on dad, 'm."

She eyed him sharply.

"And your brother?"

Ern said nothing.

"Well then, you leave your bag here, and step across the Moot to the office. Southdown Transport Co., back of the Star by the Quaker Meeting-house. You'll sleep the night here."

Ernie crossed the brickfields, passed his old school where the children were singing the evening hymn, under the church upon the Kneb, through what the old inhabitants still called Ox-steddle Bottom, where once his father had pointed out to him the remains of Roman byres.

The office was in Borough Lane.

Mrs. Pigott had warned her husband by telephone.

Ernie therefore was shown into the inner sanctum at once.

Mr. Pigott, grizzled now, but with the old almost aggressive air of integrity, summed his erstwhile pupil up with the eyes of the appraising schoolmaster.

"It's the old Ernie. I see that," he grunted. "So Alf's been playing it up already. You needn't tell me. He's a masterpiece, that young man. Even she admits that." He paused and began again, confidential and communicative like one naughty boy whispering to another. "What d'ye think of her? She's church—more shame to her. But I forgive her. I forgive her a lot. You have to when you're married to em—as you'll find some day. And what I don't forgive I pass by. For why?—If I didn't she'd sauce me." He suddenly became aware that he was being indiscreet, even undignified, and broke off gruffly—"Well, what did they teach you in the Army?"

Ernie laughed.

"It's not so bad as they make out, sir. I like the old Regiment well enough."

"They tell me," said Mr. Pigott solemnly, "that in South Africa none of the unpopular officers came home—and they weren't shot by the Boers!"

"It depends on the Regiment, I expect," replied Ernie. "There's not much of that in the Hammer-men. Our officers were mostly all right. More gentlemen than most, from what I could see of it. They were sports, and they tried to be just. Of course there wasn't none of em like dad—only the Colonel. Hadn't the education. But some of these snotty little jumped-ups like what they had in the Welsh Liverpools that lay alongside us in Pindi ... Why I wouldn't salute em if I met em in the lines."

Mr. Pigott listened to this audacious statement with the hostile interest of the radical.

"A rotten system," he said. "Built on make-believe and lies."

"It fairly rots some of em," Ernie admitted. "Gives em more power nor what they can carry. But in the hands of the right men it don't work so bad. All depends on that."

Then Mr. Pigott asked him what he proposed to do.

"That's what I come to you about, sir."

"Of course your brother won't help!"

"No, sir; nor I wouldn't ask him," flashed Ernie.

"And I don't blame you," answered Mr. Pigott. "Alf's too busy taking the Mass and walking in processions to help his brother.... Now I'll tell you what to do. You go up and see Mr. Trupp. He can do anything he likes now he's disembowelled Royalty. And if he can't help you, I must; though I haven't got a vacant job in the yard just now. You're to sleep at my place, she says."

He followed Ernie to the door.

"What d'you make of your father?" he asked mysteriously.

"I don't rightly understand him, sir," Ernie answered.

"Don't you?" said Mr. Pigott. "I do." He dropped his voice. "He's waiting the Second Coming, I'm sure of it."

When Ernie presented himself at the Manor, Mr. Trupp was out. Ernie thought Mrs. Trupp would see him. The smart maid thought not. Ernie, however, proved right.

Mrs. Trupp was sitting in the long drawing-room, with her daughter, and greeted him with pleasure.

"Ernie!" cried Mrs. Trupp. "This is a sight for sair e'en. What a man you've become!"

"Was Alfred decent to you?" blurted Bess.

Mrs. Trupp shot a warning glance at her impetuous daughter.

"And have you seen the new Mrs. Pigott?" she asked.

"She's top-hole," cried Bess. "He never stops talking about her. Really after that other old thing always sitting on his head——"

Then Mr. Trupp entered, smiling, and cocking his face to sum up his visitor through his pince-nez.

"You needn't introduce yourself, Ernie," he growled. "You've taken no harm, I see."

Later the two men retired to the consulting-room to talk business.

"Would you care for a temporary job at the Hohenzollern?" asked Mr. Trupp; "the German Hotel on the Crumbles. It was building in your time. They want a lift-man, I know."

"Anything, sir," answered Ernie with easy enthusiasm.

Mr. Trupp rang up the Hotel and arranged the matter there and then.

"It will do as a stop-gap, anyway," he said, "until we can fix you up in a permanent job. You don't want to be knocking about at home, twiddling your thumbs."

"That I don't, sir!" laughed Ernie a thought ironically, and returned to Deep-dene to tell his luck.

Mr. Pigott glanced at his wife.

"The Hohenzollern," he said gruffly. "Well, give it a try."

Next day Mr. Pigott met the Doctor in the street.

"Well," he said, "what d'you think of your soldier?"

"Done him no harm anyway," replied Mr. Trupp, quite impenitent.

"I don't know," retorted the other. "He left here a gentleman: he comes back a labourer—fit to work a lift."

"None the worse for that," said Mr. Trupp. "Mr. Wyndham's been telling us we want fewer clerks and more working-men. There's no satisfying you radicals."

"Better than a jumped-up jackanapes in black leggings and a pilot coat, I will admit," answered the other. "Yes, you've got a lot to answer for, Mr. Trupp. First you send him off to the army; and directly that's finished you pack him off to the Hohenzollern Hotel."

"Might be worse places," muttered Mr. Trupp.

Mr. Pigott held up a hand in horror.

"Doctor!" he cried, "I tell you what it is. Ever since you saved that Tsar you've been a changed man."

"I don't know about that," said Mr. Trupp. "I only know that Tsars forget to pay their Doctor's bills."

"I'm glad to hear it," answered Mr. Pigott. "Very glad," with emphasis. "A lesson to you to leave the insides of Royalty to emselves in future."